Matt’s Tidbits #13 — Utilizing Google Play Store tracks

Last time I wrote about using tools: attributes. This week, I wanted to write about a helpful feature in the Google Play Store — tracks.

The primary reason for publishing an app to the Play Store is of course making it available to users all over the world. But, app deployments can sometimes be risky. Perhaps you’re experimenting with a new feature and want to gather user feedback before rolling it out to the world, or your QA resources are limited and you want to give users a chance to try your app before it’s really ready for primetime.

Whatever your reason, the Google Play Store has tools that can help you! There used to be a slightly confusing set of alpha/beta options for publishing pre-release builds, but in the past year or so these have been streamlined. There are a total of 4 different “tracks” you can release your app to, and they are as follows:

• Production — this is the real deal, full public release of your app
• Open (Beta) — this is a great place to roll out new features to a smaller group of users. Anyone can participate, but they have to go to a special section in the Play Store for Beta apps, and have to opt-in to acknowledge that they’re downloading beta software.
• Closed (Alpha) — this is a great way to have your app in the Play Store but control who has access to it. Only users who have been given permission (and a link to your app) will be able to access this after opting-in to the program.
• Internal test — this is an ideal way to distribute your app to the very first pass of people who may need to access it — typically developers, QA, or key stakeholders.

There are a few additional benefits to using pre-release tracks:

• Users who download the alpha or beta versions of your app will automatically receive updates issued on the production track — Google helps make it easy to transition users off alpha/beta builds automatically.
• It can be time-consuming to prep an app for the Play Store — typing up release notes, uploading screenshots, etc. Once your app is in any track, it’s easy to “promote” it to the next level (from Closed/Alpha to Open/Beta, or Open/Beta to Production, etc.) This can help make your production releases smooth and streamlined, as everything is already set up in the Play Store — you’re just changing what track a given build is available in.
• Distributing early-release versions of your app through the Google Play Store helps you test the release process and what it will actually look like for users to download your app.
• Compared to distributing pre-release app versions manually (say, via email), you won’t have to worry about whether your test users actually installed the new version — if you upload an updated version to the Play Store, their app will be updated to the latest version automatically.

For more information on the different tracks and how to use them, takea look at Google’s official help article.

I hope you learned something helpful and are inspired to make use of some of the tools the Google Play Store has to offer! Have a question or a success story of a time using a pre-release version of an app saved the day? Leave a comment below! And, please follow me on Medium if you’re interested in being notified of future tidbits.

This tidbit was originally delivered on 3/30/2018.